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ActiveState Discontinues VisualPerl/Python
Noiser writes "ActiveState discontinues VisualPerl and VisualPython for Windows. Demand doesn't justify further development, they say. No, they don't mean to open-source these products, due to licensing problems with the inseparable MS Visual Studio integration code. Back to vi/Notepad/Komodo, then..."
Visual Studio??? + Perl???
Isn't that what bad software engineers are forced to use for eternity in Hell?
Yeeeechhh!!!
If you want plugins for a big heavy IDE for Perl and Python then Eclipse still works just fine. For Perl there's EPIC, and for Python there's PyDev. Both are reasonably mature, quite featureful, and generally pleasant to work with.
The only reason to be using vi/Notepad/whatever is if you are wanting to stay away from big heavy IDEs. That's not to say that isn't a perfectly sensible reason, just that the existence or not of VisualPerl and VisualPython really doesn't have a lot to do with it.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
... or use notepad++, which kicks ass.
Information is a process.
It is also comparitively painless to build Perl natively Windows, given the now-free Visual C++ commandline compiler environment. (We don't do much C++ on Windows where I work, so Visual Studio 6 is still state-of-the-art.)
The native Win32 version does not suffer from any of the issues the Cygwin port has; it's a real Windows program, so you get real Windows paths and so on. It can even look for things like perl5lib in the Registry, if you're into that sort of thing.
Um, I did mention Emacs. You didn't think we all used it because it was such a brilliant Notepad substitute, did you?
In all seriousness, I've had pretty much all the functionality you mentioned for years, but for many more languages. Visual Studio wasn't the first widely popular IDE, you know.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
So do vim and emacs (in vim, all my recently opened projects are in the file menu, or I can open ~/src/projects in the file browser and pick one--it'll remember which files I had open in which windows the last time I was working on it, reset all my bookmarks, etc).
They allow for compilation without having to write your own batch file.
Compilation? We're talking perl/python here, right? I hit F11 to restart my web servers (and reread all the code), or select the client I want to restart from a menu in vim (we run seperate web servers for each of the clients we host, I just pick the one I'm want to switch to from the menu--F11 restarts the one I'm currently working on if I don't want to switch). Of course, since I'm working in an interpreted language I rarely need a restart anyway.
But at any rate, clicking the "Make" button in my vim toolbar will build the current project when I do C/C++/Java dev work. You're right that I have to create a Make file, but you're going to have to do that anyway for any multiplatform project--and if I'm doing something like GUI design, my GUI builder creates the Makefile for me anyway.
And when I hit make, if the compilation failed it'll jump me to the file/line where the first error was; I can fix it, go to the next error, etc from the toolbar (or keystrokes), then hit the make button again when I'm satisfied. As I jump around between errors, it shows the compiler's error messages in the status line.
Intellisense saves me - easily - thousands of key-strokes per day. Being able to type two or three letters and hit tab or ctrl-space-tab to complete keywords or object names makes coding a line incredibly fast.
Meta-/ in emacs or Ctrl-P/Ctrl-N in vim will do word completion, I don't know about emacs but in vim they'll limit it to currently applicable tags (so if I'm doing Java/C++ and I call object.foo then it'll only complete methods that start with foo and are methods of whatever class "object" is--or in C it'll only complete struct members, etc). I'd be shocked if emacs didn't do something similar.
Vim 7 will also have OmniComplete (it's in the dev tree already) which is pretty much like Intellisense if the using a period and getting a dropdown (instead of just getting a tab-completion style listing of matches) is really that a big deal to you.
Emacs and vim aren't wimpy text editors. Other things I can do:
1. If I'm editing a python file, I get a nice dropdown menu showing the parent classes of the one I'm editing, the child classes, and all the methods. I can select them from the menu to jump to them.
2. If I'm typing a call I get the method signature and beginning of help in my status line. So if, say, I type "cmp(" then the status line reads:If I hit F1, I get the full help text.
3. I can jump to tags easily, so if I see a call to "foo.blargle()" then I can click on "blargle" and it'll jump into the blargle method of class foo; I can keep drilling down through function calls, then hit back to pop back up the call stack to where I started.
4. I can get diffs against other versions of source control, where it shows the 2 versions side by side with the changes highlighted (different colors for what was added, removed, or modified). And I can easily check files into/out of source control.
5. I can do folding/outlining (so if I'm editing a file, I can toggle between seeing the whole file or seeing an outline of just the class/method definitions, then find what I'm looking for and expand back to seeing everything--it's far more powerful than that once you're used to it).
Lots more, but those are a few highlights.
rage, rage against the dying of the light